Re: [ccp4bb]: Mail & Mime (was attachments)

[Phil Evans <pre@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk>]

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OK I think I understand this a little bit more (but perhaps someone
can explain what MIME is & why I should have to know about it)

Firstly, I had no intention of complaing about people using
non-english character sets (eg chinese or whatever), I was just
confused (see question above). Indeed I had the same problem with a
meesage yesterday from the US in charset iso-8859-7


Mail messages seem (often) to have in their header a line of the form

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Searching my current (quite large) mailbox I've come across four
different charsets

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=big5
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=gb2312
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-7

[incidently why are some mail messages "multipart"?]

With the vm mail-reader in XEmacs (& perhaps Gnu Emacs) the charsets
which can be simply displayed in the normal window have to be
explicitly listed in a variable, which can be set in the user's .vm or
...emacs file. Mine now reads 

(setq vm-mime-default-face-charsets 
   '("us-ascii" "iso-8859-1" "iso-8859-7" "big5" "gb2312"))

By default only the first 2 are defined (even in the most recent vm
release): I hope I won't have this trouble from now on (or are there
other charsets out there?). Thanks to Dave Love for pointing me at
this variable.

JP writes:
 > > Anders.Aberg@astrazeneca.com wrote:
 > > > 
 > > > and there are a lot of us using bizarre characters.
 > > 
 > > heck, a lot of us ARE bizarre characters!
 > > -- 
 > 
 > yeah, Dave, you should know ;)
 > 

that goes for many of us

 >  PE> Luddite note: Email used to be simple, 
 > 
 > Remember the infamous EARN gateway, for instance? :-/

Ah yes :-( 
A truly inventive mail-mangler

 > 
 >  PE> why has it got so complicated?
 > 
 > Mostly Microsoft, especially when they ignore standards and good
 > sense, though they're not implicated in this case.

I would end to reiterate an appeal to people not to send messages to
ccp4bb or other bulletin boards in html (not uncommon) or as
attachments (fortunately rare). I retract my comments about
alternative charsets

	    Phil